KARACHI, May 3: Hundreds of people offered special prayers for Osama bin Laden here on Tuesday with organisers declaring the Al Qaeda chief a martyr, police said.

The event was called by Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JuD), a Pakistani charity on the US terror blacklist over its alleged links to Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), the outlawed Kashmiri militant group India blames for the 2008 Mumbai attacks.

Carrying party flags and chanting anti-US slogans, the participants gathered on a road in Gulshan-i-Iqbal and offered funeral prayers for Bin Laden, witnesses said.

Police officer Saeed Ahmed said around 1,000 people took part in the prayers, some of them weeping, according to witnesses. Police and paramilitary troops were deployed but the crowd dispersed peacefully.—AFP